


a sunday afternoon on the island of katie's mind

by sapoeysap



Category: Power Rangers Time Force
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, Multi, Ranger Romance 2019, Smut, World's most improbable friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 01:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17499314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapoeysap/pseuds/sapoeysap
Summary: the 21st century doesn't quite meet up with the 31st century’s concepts.





	a sunday afternoon on the island of katie's mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychoroach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychoroach/gifts).



> rrrrrrranger romance,  
> first off thanks to the mods for all the effort here in matching up and just hosting this thing. this is still my favourite challenge.  
> psychoroach, i hope you like this, the prompt was quite vague so my mind stumbled out this little segement. I think everyone will agree with me when i say katie walker deserved more, this is just one attempt at giving her that.

There’s an expectation here, at the start of the 21st century, the embers of the 20th still lingering in the air. That woman can’t be strong as well as loved. Katie doesn’t get it, but she’s not the one that must deal with it. Jen does in the way Wes treats her, he’s scared and intimidated yet attracted to the time force leader. All Katie want’s is to be strong and powerful yet held like she’s a flower, delicate and constantly on the edge of dying without attention.

The way it starts, as all good things in life, is not how it should have been expected. A thousand years out from where she should be, and a man with a sharp jawline and an odd burning hatred for people around him, that might be something else like admiration. Buried deep down. It’s just her and Eric at the clock tower, shadows cast dramatically on the floor. She will never recollect why Eric was there in the first place. But he was, a look in his eyes that she couldn’t place at the time (wistfulness she realises later). And he says that he watched a film once, as a child, in which someone stared at a painting and wondered why the world was like this and why he was nothing at all, how that was the only time he had let himself cry. That sometimes Katie reminds him of that feeling, how he gets stirred up at the artwork. She says take me to this artwork then because the future has art, but it could be different. Silver Hills gallery is post-modernist sharp lines and glass panels. He pays for the tickets and takes her up to a painting, she doesn’t understand it. Just lines and colours and nothing classical. They stare and stare until the lines are blurred and the colours are just spots.

It's just chattering between them, nothing important, until she says how she would like that, in regard to a statue of a dainty feminine figure, wrapped up in the arms of a strong man. Eric tells her, that he dreams of yellow, but the yellow has blonde hair and an angry temperament, he tells her that the yellow he dreams off is sometimes red, with a soft voice and foppish hair. But he lets her hold his hand, not like love, but just as friends. No one else gets it, how Katie somehow defrosted Mr Eric ‘Ice King’ Myers, but they share stolen glances and compliments in the middle of banter. She even lets him win an arm wrestle.

Katie gets it now, the antiquated gender structure that leads to the 21st-century attitude on love, strength and feminity. She watches Jen fall for Wes, not because he’s like Alex, but because he’s someone else, an individual in nearly identical packaging. She watches just about all of them fall for Eric in some way or another, once everyone gets on her level and realises, he’s just grumpy and stoic but has hidden layers. (like an onion, Trip laughs and says one day). Lucas is too heart eyes over Nadira and the most rooted in 21st Century gender constructs to really be affected by Eric’s charm. Trip’s mooning over everyone but falling flat on his face at every turn, it’s the most endearing thing to watch. Everyone has a soft spot for Trip in that sense.

They defeat this monster, a hulking bulk of ugliness. But too close of a call for Wes, who wants to be heroic, with all the red ranger energy coursing through his DNA, even in a team he’s not really the leader off. Trip and Lucas have disappeared, something about a drive to destress (she wonders about their friendship, and what exactly roots it. That they are such different people yet bond so closely) And she feels alone, she needs comfort, in the post-fight ‘I nearly watched my teammate die’ way. There’s muffled noise as she climbs the stairs to the living space in the clock tower and finds out that Eric and Jen feel exactly the same way.

Katie wonders how she takes up space in the shadows so easily, watching on as Jen presses kisses to Wes’s wounds, and Eric presses bandages on top of Jen’s kisses. Jen’s never been this soft or had hands that shaky. She watches from her hidden spot, as Jen presses a kiss to Wes’ mouth. Eyes wide as Eric takes Jen’s hands and pulls himself closer to the pink ranger. Jen never seems small thanks to her personality, but next to Eric’s build she looks tiny. The pink ranger is pulling away from Wes’ lips, Eric’s leaning down into the recently vacant space. Wes looks soft, loveable yet weary, his eyes go wide and then flutter shut as he tilts into Eric’s kiss. Somehow that flutter of eyes is the indicator to Katie, the realisation that this is new. The breaking of hard ground, to build foundations. She spies and she aches for what’s in front of her.

Eric kisses hard and slow, like he means it but at the same time is terrified it will be pulled away from him at any second. Wes kisses back like he can barely work out how the world works, let alone how to kiss someone, but he gets by if judging from the sounds Eric’s making. And when the two men have pulled away, Jen kisses Eric, she kisses him with a fire that looks the same as the fire that burn’s in Wes’ eyes.

Katie wants to turn away, the sight in front of her isn’t hers to see, the longing inside of her is for only her to be burdened with. It feels like the museum, living artwork in front of her, taking her breath away. There’s a fire burning in her stomach and a dent in the wall that she’s been pressed against. Questions of if the fire is born of jealousy, want or need.

The artwork is shifting, Eric topless, Jen’s skirt pulled up and Wes, Wes is in between her legs. Katie feels like a molten core inside. It’s been a long time since she last felt the touch of someone else in that way, but not a long time in the same moment because time travel does that. Shifts you out into situations that shouldn’t be. There’s a clock on the wall behind her, an old one that hadn’t been cleared out, it doesn’t tell the correct time, yet it ticks steadily behind her. Inadvertently counting down to something. That something is the unravelling of Jen.

Katie watches as her leader, her friend and her trusted confidante, reaches peak pleasure and unravels. The way Eric’s hand traces down Wes’ back, Wes whose mouth is glistening with Jen. Katie finds herself clenching her arms too tight, whimpering with pent up frustration. It’s enough to get Eric’s attention. He sees her in the dark corner, his eyes light up. She thinks it’s over, she’s been caught, a voyeur in the wrong place.

Instead, he puts on a show. Eric is nothing but a good studier of people. The act of grumpy distance he puts between himself and others allows for him to study everyone intently. Katie blames this fact for the way Eric manoeuvres Jen and Wes into positions that burn Katie’s core completely. 

She feels the afterglow as much as the three in front of her, Wes’s voice is a lulled timbre as he calls her name. It’s like being pulled by a string, leaving the shadows that have been her support for hours or minutes or however much time has elapsed.

Belatedly she realises it’s all happened on a table, they hadn’t even made it to the beds which are probably 6 metres away. In their own time, there’s a bunch of holo-memes about cats, the one that’s sticking out in her mind is one of a very grumpy looking cat curled in a sunspot surrounded by content dogs. Eric’s the content cat in this situation. Wes pulls her into the cuddle pile, not before making her grab a blanket. He doesn’t say how he knows she was there, but the three of them make her feel content and part of things, part of a new.

 

That’s probably why it hurts when it doesn’t continue. When she never catches any of them in any variation sharing kisses. And then they are travelling back home, or to what was home. It’s confused as much as she is. The worst part of it all is that it was only for that brief second, caught in the afterglow, that she had felt the way she had always wanted to. Strong and loved. She misses Eric, misses Wes, misses that feeling of displacement. Jen looks at Alex like he’s Wes and not like the man she knew from before.

Every night she dreams of the goodbye on the beach. Trip and Lucas are unaffected, Jen says nothing at all, Circuit tells her that it will get easier with time.

It doesn’t.

The dreams of the beach get weirder as time goes by, more distorted. Some turn into nightmares where she crushes Wes completely with her hug, his bones cracking into dust and disappearing into the sand. If the beach was still there and not eradicated by the literal sands of time, she would go visit it and mourn properly. What she would be mourning is beyond her. Other dreams, the beach morphs into the art museum, she feels the ghost of Eric’s hand in hers and the paintings turn into holo photos. An archive of loneliness.

She keeps her attitude positive, it’s not good to hide things away behind a smile. But the thing is, it's so hard to not be happy. Everything is really good, she’s back home and everyone is happy and settled.  She is strong and feminine and powerful in this time, a good Time Force officer. Best of the best, A squad Time Force. The hollowness in her chest will go, Circuits right, it will disappear in time. And the other officers who she meets are not faceless or nameless, but their bodies are all but disposable to her.

It’s been a year, and everything is easier. Jen’s disappeared on some mission that Alex is tightlipped about.  The dream that she’s on the beach is suddenly real life. It’s delightful, even with the tenseness of Ransik’s presence and the sudden reunification of teams. The power of coming from the future is knowing vague facts about the ranger teams that come after them. The Wild Force Team Is more adorable than Katie could have imagined. There up on the Animarium Lucas pretends to hate Danny and Max’s dynamic but smiles at Trip when he can pull himself away from Nadira. And Katie watches everyone else have someone, Eric’s finally found his blonde and they're perfect together. Jen and Wes are having some odd reunion that seems both awkward and stilted and very loving all at once. Cole and Alyssa are perfect for each other yet dancing on the precipice of a relationship. Trip’s slotted in with Danny and Max. And there Katie is, surrounded by people and all alone. She sneaks out from the Animarium, when everyone else is sleeping apart from Princess Shayla, who helps her down from the floating island.

Katie lies on the beach and watches the stars, wonders if they are the same as in her time. Science and logic say yes, but her brain says that she will never see these stars in the same formation and space ever again. The sand is coarse under her. And that one-night plays in her mind. The way she wasn’t even part of things yet had felt so close to the others. When she opens her eyes again, Eric, Wes and Jen are sat on the beach with her. The sun is rising casting a watercolour pale hue across the world. Taylor’s shadow is jogging across the beach in the distance and Eric is watching her but holding Katie’s hand.

Nothing’s resolved really. Yet this moment feels like the closure Katie has spent the past year of her life searching for.  Lying on the beach in a world that isn’t quite her own. And finally, as she smiles into the sunrise, everything settles in her. Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. Circuit was right, it does get easier with time, even if that time turns out to be a thousand years into the past.

On the journey back, hurtling through time and space, Katie hears Shayla’s song echoing in her ears. She will probably never come back to the 21st Century. And maybe that’s a good thing. But there’s a feeling she won’t lose sleep over that anymore.

(4 days back into her own time, the city walls she grew up in surrounding her, she meets a person who makes her feel everything she wanted and more)  

**Author's Note:**

> I was like 5 when Time Force aired, so therefore not using the internet. But from my knowledge, memes were not called memes but did exist. I presume we will still be memeing' into the 3000s. Holo Meme's is a great concept. I imagine katie/trip/lucas have like a group chat were they send each other holo memes and it like comes through on there watches. 
> 
> (lampshade hanging, bryce edition #3218, overabundance on film referencing)


End file.
